IP Collateral Management API Development and Validation System

Abstract

The development of a VLSI product can be explained as an idea developing as a set of steps, each of which improves the level of detail, moving towards a functionality exploiting the features of a semiconductor. Owing to the continuous improvements in the market, System on Chip design has emerged as an never ending choice for large scale complex system requirements. It involves high quality IP development. This process broadly goes through a front end and another back end set of steps along with a bunch of validation steps. The steps are linked to each other by way of inter dependencies of collaterals. So the output of one stage is consumed by another. Therefore there is a need for an IP development and validation tool which would amalgamate the tool operations and offer easier handling of all the collaterals. In order to fit in all of these criteria there is a need for validation system. As part of this thesis, such an API Development and Validation System is taken through various aspects of improvement. The validation system regression aspect is switched from a legacy flow to advanced flow. Multiple teams are working globally on IP development flow in parallel using multiple tools in each stage. So we need a central interface to manage the IP development flow. Through my project proposal a solution will be developed that will help to drastically overcome the shortcomings of the previous work methodology through the development of the new IP tool which will let the integrators focus on engineering decisions and not on tool or configuration problems. At the same time it will greatly reduce the integration time of any IP in the SOC environment and will empowers the IP to know that their delivered collateral will be healthy and complete in the customers environment.